


once my eyes knew water

by axilet



Series: This Family Is Alright [5]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon - Video Game, Dubious Morality, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Regret, The past is never past, Unrequited Love, reworking of canon, undead character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 07:44:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1258456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axilet/pseuds/axilet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lucrecia and Vincent come to an understanding better late than never. Re-imagining of the Crystal Cave sidequest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	once my eyes knew water

Lucrecia is burning.

Everything burns. She kneels by the side of a great river that refuses to quench her flame or her thirst. The river nurtures only the living and though she is not dead everything about her that could be called _alive_ has already been turned to ash or cast carelessly aside. The Planet did not disown her; she disowned herself. She saw the stars and reached up recklessly to seize them for herself; and it is a long, very long way down.

_This child will save the human race,_ she remembers thinking as darkness ate away the world that was once hers. She remembers the certainty of her vision even when she first realized she would no longer be able to experience the future she dreamed of for herself. She remembers being sure of a great many things, of a purpose worth suffering, dying for.

Now she knows. The straight path that ran so reassuringly and unerringly toward the light was only a narrow tunnel that blinded her to the truth. She only sees, when her eyes are forever shut. She only believes, when the river of souls flows before and beyond her into the great unknown.

Lucrecia is waiting.

That is her only hope; if hope is the right word for a selfish desire born out of despair. The terrible wound in the sky scorches her pale eyes when she tips her head back to stare with a hunger that ravages whatever is left of her living soul. When the meteor falls, everything will come to an end. The perforated heart of the Planet as it bleeds out into the frozen void of space. The cycle of life and death. This existence that is little more than a tortured half-awareness, a daily recounting of her sins.

This is her son’s doing; the child she never knew, the man she will never know. Lucrecia grieves, Lucrecia loves. Even now she feels the pride that had first damned her and then buried her in this prison with no lock and no key. Here is the awesome power, the indomitable will that she had imagined would avert humanity from its self-destructive road; and so he has, once and for all.

Then Vincent Valentine walks in, in a turn of events that seems almost inevitable now that time’s forward momentum has been arrested; the past, always chasing fruitlessly behind, catches up at last to the present. Lucrecia staggers, overwhelmed, the faintest tinge of salt washing over her tongue. The taste of tears and regret that can only exist now in memory.

“Lucrecia!” he exclaims, his voice muffled with more than the scarf wound around his mouth and neck. (His companions, picking up a silent cue, about-face at once.) His hand draws forward in one convulsive movement; the other, clawed and golden, trembles at his side. “Lucrecia, is that...is that you?”

“Yes and no, Vincent,” she says, from behind the meager safety of a warding hand. “Stay back. _Please._ ”

He freezes. They stand there for a long while simply looking, starkly conscious of and reading the changes in each other like the text of a long and convoluted tragedy. Vincent Valentine is a man only slightly more alive than he is dead and she is a woman rather more dead than alive. For the first time in their acquaintance it feels as if they are on equal ground; their eyes on a level where there is no longer a need to look up to or look down on one another. His initial shock has faded and he gazes at her and through her flickering form at the luminescent crystals in the wall with an expression that hints at a terrible and empathetic understanding.

“What happened to you?” he says, calming himself with what is obviously a massive effort, but the crimson eyes locked on hers grow no less intense. “You _died_. I was there. I _saw it happen_.”

His voice shakes with the horror of his experience but its structure miraculously continues to hold. In their final conversation a lifetime and an entire age ago they had both succumbed to emotion five minutes in, their arguments convincing each other of nothing save that the other person was a complete and utter fool. It is a more subtle change that the alchemy of time had wrought than the physical alterations that had so drastically disfigured his body. Lucrecia listens to the irregular rhythm of his breaths, the hum of smoothly running mechanisms within the shell of his mechanical arm. The song of his soul is discordant with shrill notes that do not belong; here and there splinters of darkness driven deep like the foundations of a haunted house, forever stained with the marks of its bloody past.

“I _did_ die,” Lucrecia answers. “Right until the moment I stopped. I can’t go forward...and I can’t go back.” She smiles at him as though she’s said something amusing, in a parody of their old intimacy. “I’m sure you know the feeling.”

Vincent bows his head, long hair falling from his shoulders to brush his jaw in a study of contrasts. He is so deathly pale; so melodramatically tragic with his ragged red cloak,  unkempt appearance and literal demons caged inside his heart that she finds inside herself a flicker of genuine humor, like a gem unexpectedly come across mired in the quagmire of their shared past. She wants to gently poke fun at him, she wants to see him laugh as he ineptly defends himself.

She does not. She no longer has the right.

“There is nothing I can do for you,” he says, with quiet, aching sorrow. “Is there?”

“You already tried, Vincent,” Lucrecia says bluntly. “You already failed.”

Vincent flinches, turning his face aside from her mortal blow. Lucrecia goes on, relentless: “The world is going to end. Leave, and enjoy whatever time that remains with your friends. Live the life that you lost, for the love of a dead woman; and I am an even lesser creature than she was. Please, _leave me alone_. For both our sakes.”

“This is all because I failed you,” Vincent bites out, his eyes closing as if to seek a reprieve from the sight of her. She wonders how many times he must have rehearsed his apology, over and over again, until it is burned into his brain as a festering brand; even though he couldn’t have expected to ever deliver it in this life, or the next. “I am sorry—I’m so sorry I couldn’t—”

“I failed myself,” Lucrecia cries out, unable to bear it any longer; the sure knowledge of another life ruined because of her. “Please grant me this much respect, Vincent, when you’re standing in my very grave; let me take responsibility for my own actions. Acknowledge the truth that _I deserve this._ ”

“I don’t see Hojo anywhere around,” Vincent says, unrelenting, his ice a cracking exterior over his rage, hotter than the congealing mess in his veins. A burden nearly as heavy as his guilt to carry. “The punishment is unfair by default when two supposedly charged of the same crime pay penance so unevenly.”

Lucrecia shrugs with an indifference that betrays her. “What does it matter now? The world’s coming to an end. Everyone from your friends to your worst enemy will burn up into ash; a far more agonizing death than you could ever devise for him.”

“Not so. My...the group I am travelling with,” Vincent says, faltering at, and quickly evading, the apparently unimaginable concept of personal friendship, “...we intend to save the Planet.”

Shock flashes through her like a lightning strike, for more than one reason. “That’s not possible. Once activated the Black Materia cannot be stopped.”

“The Planet is more than capable of saving itself,” Vincent says. He looks away. “...if only a certain obstacle can first be removed.”

“...My son.” The words slip out before she can stop them, before she can grasp, in desperation, at the comfort of incomprehension: “You’re going to kill my son.” _You’re going to take him away from me...again._

“Forgive us,” Vincent says. (She hears, _forgive me._ ) “But it is necessary.”

She sneers, flinging her words at him like daggers at the only target she can reach, undeserving though it may be. “Then, I thought despite the danger carrying and delivering  a child of the Ancients was _necessary_. I fantasized about being a hero who would usher in a new age of progress for humanity. But as it turned out, I was wrong. More than that, I was completely self-deluded.” The anger drains out of her as suddenly as it arose, leaving her exhausted. “This dream...was not mine alone. Is it _necessary_ to kill him as well?”

“He orchestrated everything, Lucrecia,” Vincent says, remorse instantly replaced with hatred. “ He plotted to drive Sephiroth insane. He’s been cooperating fully with Jenova. Even now he is helping Sephiroth to destroy the world...even though he himself would be destroyed with it. His motives are incomprehensible, his methods inhumane. He is a monster…” His jaw clenches, rippling the fabric of his scarf. “...who exists only to make other monsters. How can you possibly care for him, even now?”

“We were always more alike than your love for me allowed you to see,” Lucrecia says, shaking her head. “I died for a cause I believed to be greater than myself; would the man I married be no less willing?” She crosses her arms defiantly. “Are you disappointed in me now, Vincent?  I'm afraid the pedestal you placed my broken body on was always too high for the real me to reach."

“You know yourself best,” Vincent admits after an uneasy pause where he stares at her, perhaps with the eyes of the Turk who had made a living out of ferreting out the worst traits of people.“Perhaps if you had lived you would be our enemy today. But you did not and so there is no reason to dwell on that possibility.”

“Says the man so determined to plant his feet in the past,” Lucrecia mocks. “Unlike you I don’t have a choice about it; whether the Planet dies or not there is _nothing_ ahead of me to look forward to. In fact, I find oblivion to be much preferable to this half-life.” She grins mirthlessly. “If I could, I would help Sephiroth too. What do you think of that, Vincent? Shouldn’t I despise this Planet who has inflicted on me, as you have so eloquently described it, this unfair punishment? Shouldn’t I want revenge _on the Planet_?”

Vincent has grown paler, his eyes wide in horrified comprehension. This time her knives have struck, and struck hard. “I never considered—”

“Exactly.” Her bitterness rubs salt into Vincent’s wounds.“I wasn’t a good person,Vincent, and I’m not one even after all this time. That’s why just forget about all of it—being sorry for me, or swearing vengeance. It’s pointless. Do whatever you want. I can’t stop you. I can’t do anything, anymore.”

Vincent sighs, long and bone-rattling. “I am set in my resolve,” he admits. “Your blessing was not required for me to make my decision...although I would have liked to have it.” He regards her with a clarity that she feels strangely proud of him for, even if they’ve both walked a long, painful road to get this far: out in the open with no walls between them, it feels as if they have attained a closeness never achieved in their younger and more foolish days.

Vincent says, “Let me apologize for this much, at least: I am sorry that I never saw you as you truly were.”

He turns to comply with her final request. Lucrecia reaches out, catching ineffectually at the tattered edges of his cloak. “Wait!”

When he stops, her hands enter his back, and then his heart, setting him ablaze with her fire. Despite the agony he fights to stay in control of his emerging demons, with an absolute trust that cuts as deep as it sincerely moves her. Ridges and spines circle like sharks under the tumultuous expanse of his skin. Lengthening teeth gouge his bottom lip. The demons scream in a raucous cacophony of sound, multiple voices that very slowly meld into a single roaring cry. One by one the crystals of the cave wake, glowing and singing in answer: welcoming the awakening of the creature Chaos.

Vincent gasps for breath. He has fallen to one knee and his hands, both of them, clutch at his chest as if he is trying to reach through his own flesh and bone; their palms angled toward each other in the only, pathetic, way they can touch as old lovers, as friends again. “Lucrecia,” he says, her name taut between his teeth like a lifeline. “Lucrecia…”

“Put this to good use,” Lucrecia says, pulling free with a pang from the too-fleeting contact. “You’ll need it.”

Vincent collapses almost at once, but his mind is not so blurred with pain that he does not understand, completely and utterly. He props himself up on an elbow, staring up at her with eyes that are softened around the edges with an old-new regard that has for once ceased to hurt.

“And please,” Lucrecia says, “If you can, show mercy to my husband and my son.”

“You have my word,” Vincent promises. He rises, somewhat shakily, to his feet. “Goodbye, Lucrecia.”

“Goodbye, Vincent.”

She watches him leave hopefully never to return. She is so tired, her essence scraped raw and thin with the effort of summoning Chaos. But the last time she slept was when she had died, only to wake and remain awake, from now until an indefinite point in the future the length of which might as well be as long as eternity.

All she can do now is wait until then.

And wait, perhaps, for someone to join her.

_-end_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Great gallopin’ Galian Beasts, this one TOOK SO LONG. Not really satisfied with how it turned out but calling it quits. And I’m STILL slogging through the pre-canon fic set in the Northern Crater/Nibelheim Mansion that to date consists mostly of random orphaned scraps and ideas scribbled on pieces of paper. Turns out Lucrecia’s POV is really hard to write especially since my interpretation of her takes such generous liberties with game canon and Compilation canon that she might as well be an OC at this point. See: this “reimagined canon” fic which is pretty much a thinly disguised AU.
> 
> Title comes from a Tom Stoppard quote from _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ : “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”


End file.
